Dean Blunt’s reputation precedes him. Earlier this year, at the ICA, fans coming to listen to his music, which mixes elements of dub, hip-hop, electronic and post-punk, instead found themselves watching a standup routine by the American comedian Kevin Hart on DVD, while men in vodka-branded T-shirts wandered empty-handed through the room. Even when he does materialise (at the ICA he did so several hours later), Blunt has been known to assault the audience with discombobulating noise and frenzied strobes.
It’s with some apprehension, then, that a hometown crowd gathers tonight to watch the east Londoner promote his album Black Metal, which came out earlier this month. Red lights glare through a fog of dry ice. Two imposing men in black suits flank the stage. Jazz plays for the best part of an hour, then the lights go down and a sound like rain hammering against a tin roof fills the room. This goes on for 10 minutes before Blunt appears under a spotlight.
What’s disconcerting, given his elusive reputation, is how visible he is now, standing front and centre in a black zip-up fleece and white shirt. Blunt (not his real name) is a tricky character to pin down. Biographical details are scarce, his internet presence is sketchy, and when he does submit to an interview – usually via Skype chat – he tends to be evasive and cryptic, covering his tracks with tall-sounding tales. (He told the Guardian that he met Inga Copeland, his partner in the shadowy band-cum-art-project Hype Williams, at an Oasis concert at Knebworth.)
This elusiveness extends to his music, which – particularly with Hype Williams – can seem detached and affectless. When he released his first solo album proper last year, recorded in the aftermath of his split with Copeland, it was welcomed as Blunt’s most accessible work to date. The Redeemer – about “black London love” – was a mesmerising series of sketches of a relationship falling apart. His emotional turmoil was emphasised by gushing strings and a plaintive harp, but everything had a synthetic quality, leaving open the possibility that The Redeemer was itself an act – a pastiche of the break-up record without any real feelings of its own.
He opens tonight with The Pedigree, a highlight from that album. Staring into the middle distance, sniffing angrily – is that a tear on his cheek? – he sings in a brusque monotone, stripping every ounce of conviction from the line “So happy we can still be friends”. He paces about the stage seeming genuinely aggrieved, gesticulating angrily and treating the audience like it’s not there. Usually there’s a moment when the facade slips and you can separate the performer from the performance, but not here. The effect is weirdly unsettling.
He’s joined on stage by singer Joanne Robertson, a regular collaborator, but no acknowledgment passes between them. As they run through tracks from Black Metal (“I don’t want you helping,” he growls on Blow), the mood, like the lighting, becomes progressively darker. The album follows a similar trajectory: it begins on an unexpectedly bright note, then claustrophobia seeps in as jangly guitars and sweet vocals are subsumed by electronic interference and heavy basslines. On record, Blunt projects an air of stoned detachment even in his most paranoid moments; here he sounds agitated, barking “Feds are closing in on me” (a line from Punk) instead of murmuring it.
The oppressiveness would be too much to bear if Blunt’s presence wasn’t so compellingly odd. It helps, too, that the music (and Black Metal in particular) is great, a fact that has kept fans tuned into his work despite his unwillingness to engage with them.
Just when it seems we’ve made it through the show relatively unscathed, the assault begins. Rapid-fire strobe lights strafe the room, turning it blinding white. This is accompanied by a low-decibel whomping that gathers into a drilling sound, then mutates into a high-pitched howl. Eventually the music kicks back in, but the light show doesn’t let up. Blunt keeps up his act – if that’s what it is – till the end. When the strobes finally die down and we can safely remove our hands from our eyes, he has left the stage.
